Cover Story: Barack & Load

From his office in the James Madison Building at tree-shrouded Liberty Park, a citadel of gunfire and tax exemption in Bellevue, the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb surveys an America under siege, not by the 90 million gun owners who possess 300 million firearms, but by the laws against them. At 62, armed and affable, he has spent 37 years battling gun haters, as he calls his opposition, growing his once-tiny Second Amendment Foundation into a 650,000-member crusade and transforming himself, an ex-con, into a multi-millionaire, often by demonizing gun-controlling liberals and cashing in on the backlash. 

When a gunman reportedly used an assault rifle to ambush Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton, 39, in a Halloween night drive-by two weeks ago, for example, and gun opponents raised concerns about the easy availability of such weapons, Gottlieb dashed out a press release accusing them of "dancing in Officer Brenton's blood" to "advance a political agenda." Now he's going for a landmark victory, asking the United States Supreme Court to rule that President Barack Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago is preventing homeowners from arming themselves. With pro-gun money pouring in, his group is financing a legal hit squad intent on not only bringing down U.S. gun bans but dramatically changing constitutional law.

"We've had a very well-plotted-out legal strategy for years, leading up to this," Gottlieb says of his organization's lawsuit. Chicago, because of Obama, is also a prized symbolic target. "[Obama] supports the ban, always has," Gottlieb claims.

Balding, bespectacled, and mustachioed behind a neatly-kept desk, Gottlieb clicks the keys of his laptop, checking for contributions, media requests, and hate mail. "Considering the millions of letters and e-mails I mail out and all the TV and radio I do each month, the three or four hate letters a week that I get are very minimal," he says, sitting beneath a "No Whining" sign. He's in demand by radio and cable-news interviewers daily, where he often repeats the line: "Barack Obama is the most polarizing president we've ever had."

A bow-tied conservative with rapid-fire delivery, Gottlieb boasts that he's already helped revoke the prevailing gun law of Obama's new home, Washington, D.C. The Supremes last year threw out the capital city's ban on gun ownership, in a lawsuit organized and financed by Robert Levy, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, and backed by friend-of-the-court briefs from SAF and others. But the ruling's effect was limited to the District, a federal enclave.Gottlieb's Chicago lawsuit, filed only hours after the court decided the D.C. case, could extend that ruling to any U.S. locale with a similar gun ban.

Among dozens of major lawsuits filed by SAF over the years, the Chicago case is Gottlieb's legal pinnacle, backed also by the four-million-member National Rifle Association and 34 state attorneys general. Among them is Washington's Rob McKenna, who says he has received more than 1,300 messages from constituents thanking him for signing on to Gottlieb's case. McKenna responded to all of them thus: "As you know, the right of the people to keep and bear arms guaranteed in the Second Amendment applies to federal laws regulating firearms. The brief argues that the Second Amendment should also apply to state and local laws in the same way that other rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, apply to state and local laws."

McKenna's communications director, Janelle Guthrie, says the AG's office did not receive any dissenting messages. She adds that McKenna is espousing a constitutional belief, not striving to ease up on the state's gun laws. "Our office has yet to support any measures placing fewer restrictions against guns," says Guthrie.

Conversely, Gottlieb sees gun control as a civil-rights issue—and as a living, getting better every hour that Obama is president. Like the NRA, SAF is experiencing growth in membership and contributions, reflected in corresponding increases of gun and ammunition purchases nationwide. Merchants report a steady climb in sales, which spiked immediately after Obama's November victory. (The week of his election, the FBI says it received more than 374,000 requests for background checks on gun purchasers, nearly a 50 percent jump over the same period in 2007, and the Washington Post reported last week thatnearly 12 billion rounds of ammunition were soldin the past year, an increase of more than two billion).

Though the White House says Obama has never promised to push for a gun-sale ban, Gottlieb claims that's Obama's intention, and that it has led to a hardening of the American gun debate. "The middle just gets smaller and smaller," says Gottlieb. As a result, he expects his annual budget could grow to $6 million this year, considerably more than the $3.6 million that SAF, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, took in last year, according to the group's 2008 IRS filings.

Gottlieb's major opponents, in his view, are Democrats who want to strip America down to its last water pistol. "With Obama in the White House and anti-gunners in control of key committees in Congress, the gun grabbers are out for blood," he says in one fund-raising pitch. At the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in St. Louis last month, sponsored in part bySAF (they raised money by selling racy calendars featuring the "Locked and Loaded Ladies,"), he launched into a sermon about Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the "anti-gun bigots" in the Senate who have "us and our gun rights in their crosshairs." Likewise, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre urged the 700 attendees to become "gun-rights activists" and raise a stink over Obama's possible revival of the assault-weapons ban, which George W. Bush allowed to expire in 2004.